My paternal grandmother, my Dida, was from Banaras. She spent the first 17 years of her life there before she married my grandfather and moved to the Central Provinces, now Madhya Pradesh. She waxed eloquent about Ramnagar ke baingan until her last days. She died at a ripe eighty-four and never found a baingan like the ones from Ramnagar again. Her laung lata would melt in your mouth: crisp, flaky, glossy with syrup.

When I first started shooting food-travel shows 15 years ago, Banaras was one of the first places I went. My favourite lassi in the country is the one at Raja Ram Lassi Wale in Thateri Galli, light, with the slightest fragrance of rose and mitti from the kulhad it is served in, and a slice of malai on top. Thateri Galli gets its name from the thathar-thathar sound that bartans make. It is the bartan market, or it used to be, known for hand-hammered brassware and copperware. Now it has delicious lassi, and further down the lane, Ram Bhandar, with their delicious kachoris and juicy jalebis. “Now” in Banaras is at least a 100 years old. 

I first shot at Ram Bhandar in 2011, for a series called Chakh Le India, which used to air on NDTV GoodTimes. Four years later I went back, and met a family from Surat who had come specifically because they had seen it on the show. They invited our crew to come to Surat to shoot Surat nu jaman too. That evening they were going for dinner to Taj Hotel, the other place we had shot at, in Dal Mandi.

Banaras is more than my Dida’s Banaras. It is also the Banaras of Ustaad Bismillah Khan Sahab, a Banaras which Ustaad ji famously called the source of the ras that his shehnai took from the gullies and ghats of Kashi and gave to the world, crediting the Ganga as the source of his artistic and spiritual inspiration. 

Ustaad ji lived in Dal Mandi. In his last years, every night, his dinner was the mutton istew from Taj Hotel. I know all this not because I read it. I know this because I went there, and I heard the story from Mohammad Taj ji, who after we had finished eating invited us home for a bowl of his wife’s sevaiyyan kheer. That is the work: documenting food stories, following the thread wherever it leads. And what has dawned, over the years, is that the actual story of food is the place, the people who make it, the history that has written that recipe, the culture that owns it.

It is a blessed life. The stories find you, if you let them. Like the one that tells you that if you pass through Sandila on a train you must eat the laddus that come in matakas with a red cloth tied over the mouth, or a red-cellophane sheet now. Or the one about Allahabad’s Bushy Bakery, which has been making the same Christmas cake for the last 63 years. Mohammad Aslam’s father was called Bushy, and that is how the bakery got its name. In 1963 an Anglo-Indian woman named Ms Barnett from the Railway colony came in and asked for a Christmas cake. The bakery made it with petha and murabba and ghee instead of the usual fruit, and it has been made the same way every Christmas since. A Muslim baker, an Anglo-Indian woman, a petha from Agra, a Christmas tradition. That is UP. That is what this land produces when it is left to itself. 

Everything in UP is delicious

I have been to Lucknow many times. I have eaten the delightful, sublime makhhan malai, that fleeting, wondrous winter dessert, foam set overnight in the cold dew. And I have also eaten the delightful, sublime galawati kabab. Both belong. The galawati was invented for a Nawab who had lost his teeth, in a kitchen so devoted to the pleasure of one man that it ground minced meat with spices until it dissolved on the tongue without a single act of chewing. This recipe of the nobility was then fed to the common man by a one-armed cook named Haji Murad Ali, who the city called Tunday, who opened a kabab shop near Akbari Gate in Chowk in 1905, and whose recipe has never been written down once in a 120 years. Just down the lanes of Chowk, Rahim’s has been serving nihari since 1890, slow-cooked overnight. You have to get there before nine in the morning or it is gone.

Then there is the khasta and the chaat in the afternoon, at Shukla’s or the Royal Café, and the kulfi at Prakash, which I cannot not mention. I only list the places I know. We find our way around cities by listening to their people. Like once, our local line producer turned up with chai and samosa for our evening nashta while we were shooting, and the chutney that came with it was so delicious I still think of it. I never caught the name of the place.

I have never eaten anything in UP that has not been delicious. I have said this often. I mean it every time.

Moradabadi dal and Moradabadi biryani both sit on my to-eat list. Why should they not? They are both delicious.

Kanpur Dehat is where I have eaten the best bater of my life, one that Advocate Sahib Chandra ji cooked for us, while telling us warm, detailed stories of Kayasth culinary culture. We lost track of time. It is easy to overcook bater, he cautioned.

I have eaten, with equal gusto, Thaggu ke Laddu in Kanpur. The thug’s laddu. Ram Avtar Pandey came to Kanpur from his village with nothing but his wife's laddu recipe, and the laddus were so good that soon enough he set up a shop. But Ram Avtar was a Gandhian, and Gandhi ji had called white sugar white poison, and his laddus were full of it. So he named the shop Thaggu ke Laddu and wrote on the board: aisa koi saga nahi jisko hamne thaga nahi. There is no friend or relative we have not cheated. He also sold Badnam Kulfi, the disreputable one. The same wit. Three generations later the family is still at it, still cheerfully cheating everyone. I find this whole enterprise delightful, and very Kanpur.

In Firozabad, I bought red glass bangles and ate naan gosht.

If you go to Rampur, eat the taar gosht, the gravy that pulls a thread of itself all the way up when you lift the spoon, and eat the adrak ka halwa too.

Kakori gave India three things. The mother Dussehri tree, the oldest and the first Dussehri tree in the world, still bearing fruit every summer. A kabab so fine that the meat was tenderised by the juice of that very Dussehri mango. And one of the most beautiful acts of resistance this country has ever seen, a Hindu and a Muslim stopping a British train together and taking back what the British had taken from their land.

The train robbery is not on the list. The kabab is not on the list. Kakori is not on the list.

The Ganga and the Yamuna have fed this land, this Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb, with love, and the land has not wasted the gift. Even the karela that grows in this blessed soil is sweet. That blessed soil does not grow soya chaap. A list that has no room for Kakori’s kabab or Rampur’s taar gosht finds room for Noida’s cake. I have never eaten cake in Noida.

There is a particular grief in being erased not by violence but by omission, The tehzeeb of the Ganga and the Yamuna, centuries in the making, reduced to the things that do not trouble anyone. To have fed a city for 300 years and to find yourself, one Tuesday morning, absent from a list’s idea of what that city eats.

Erase voters’ names from voter-lists. Erase dishes from culinary maps. Both voters and recipes will continue to exist.

Shubhra Chatterji is a writer, filmmaker, food-systems researcher, and co-founder of the Himalayan farmer-forward brands SAYB and Tons Valley Shop.

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